Welcome to my photo travel blog. I am a landscape and night photographer who conducts photography workshops in some of America’s most exotic landscapes.
I just completed a travel guide to the best landscape photography locations in Southern California, to be available in September 2015.

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Monday, August 10, 2015

The 2015 Perseid Meteor Shower is Underway

Comet Swift-Tuttle only passes the earth and circles the sun once every 133 years, but the earth passes through its trail of dust every year. The debris field is large, so Perseid meteors may be seen on nights from July 17 through August 24. The earth passes through the most dense portion of the comet's dust trail on the night of August 12-13, so that is when the peak, or maximum hourly rate of meteors, will be seen. The rates will also be high throughout the August 11 - 14 period, so you can look for Perseid meteors any or all nights this week.

Below is a video that I assembled in 2009 from several nights photographing the Perseid meteor shower. It is a time-lapse video that condenses several hours of meteor activity into seconds of video:

Not everything that moves in the video are meteors; the meteors are the brief streaks of light, the slower ones are airplanes. As you see the Milky Way and stars move, that is from the rotation of the earth.

You can also see haze that is smoke from forest fires that year. I may have similar challenges this year due to the fires currently raging during California's drought. Already the photo I captured above from last Saturday night is darker than usual, due to smoke from a wildfire.

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I'm an award-winning landscape and night photographer, workshop instructor, and author. I have been exploring the American West for four decades. I entered a career in digital imaging over three decades ago in the Graphic Printing and Imaging Division at Tektronix. I've used digital cameras close to 15 years. I am an avid traveler and prolific photographer, sharing new work daily for the past 10 years (as Internet availability allows, as I travel).

For the past five years, I have been recording my favorite 300+ locations in California from Yosemite to San Diego, to share them with you in my new book, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South", now available in bookstores, on Amazon.com and via my blog.

Ansel Adams

Marcus Aurelius

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breath, to think, to enjoy, to love."

John Muir

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

Ansel Adams

"I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us"

Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It":

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.I am haunted by waters.”

John Muir

"You may be a little cold some nights, on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed, or at least in your grave."

Henry David Thoreau

"The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time."

Edward Abbey

“High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring”

Ansel Adams

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."

Gary Snyder

"Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness."

Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."

Georgia O'Keeffe

"Come quickly. You mustn't miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again..."